This is an excellent collection honoring Rafael Kubelík.
The two jam-packed CDs of live 1940s broadcasts include his
central repertoire, works he championed very early on, and indeed
multiple world-premiere recordings. Not least is the first-ever
recording of Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony, a live concert
dating from December 1946; we also get a live reading of Dvorak’s
Piano Concerto with Rudolf Firkusny, from the first-ever Prague
Spring festival, and, although the booklet doesn’t identify
the premiere recordings, I’d be surprised if any earlier
performances of the Martinů Fourth Symphony or Memorial
to Lidice, or Dobiás’ Stalingrad Cantata,
exist.

The collection begins with Dvorak’s Eighth, in quite constricted
sound - turn up the volume more than normal - but glittering
with the kind of brilliance Kubelík brought to the piece
for his entire career. Aside from a prominent trumpet flub in
the finale, it’s a highly accomplished live reading by
the Czech Philharmonic, revealing they and the conductor were
masters of the symphony even in the besieged year of 1944. The
piano concerto, in sound which suggests that the orchestra is
playing somewhere very far away, nevertheless powers forward
with energy and vigor. Firkusny plays the old “revised”
piano part, with the absolute command which explains why he
has long been associated with this piece. Luckily for us, the
recording of his piano is much better than we’d expect
from the murky-sounding orchestra. Firkusny’s cadenza
is especially fine, although more recent interpreters - Aimard
with Harnoncourt, say - are more to my liking in the poetic
slow movement with its beautiful opening horn solo.

Shostakovich’s Ninth - the first recording of the work
- is given a performance unlike any since. The outer movements
are remarkably speedy affairs, with some live sloppiness but
a lot of spirit and neoclassical sharpness; by contrast the
second movement sprawls over ten minutes, the slowest I’ve
ever heard it. Compare 10:33 to Vasily Petrenko’s 8:46,
Leonard Bernstein’s 8:10, or indeed Rudolf Barshai’s
5:43. The scherzo is rather languid, too. All in all a fascinating
account of how different it is from the way the symphony is
performed today, and it’s worth overlooking the constant
audience noise. What may cause distress is the fact that distortion
in the tape results in the entire symphony sounding like it
is being performed in E rather than E flat!

Bohuslav Martinů’s Fourth, a celebratory masterpiece
inflected with joy, energy, and inner peace, receives a great
performance here (1948). It’s hard to imagine a more thrilling
scherzo than Kubelík’s, whirling forward in a great
rush of excitement, but by contrast he really milks the gorgeous
romanticism of the slow movement, unafraid to play up the different
moods - doubt at the beginning, something very like love after
6:00. Belohlávek’s recent recording on Onyx with
the BBC Symphony may be preferable in the finale, where the
new account’s freer tempos underscore the triumph of the
ending, which Kubelík - maybe intentionally - leaves
more ambivalent. The recorded sound is sufficient to give the
orchestral piano its place, although you will miss some bass
lines and timpani and the incredible colors of the opening pages.
Supraphon engineers have, as elsewhere, used technology which
removes the hisses and pops but at the expense of a slightly
constricted acoustic.

The disc is rounded out with Martinů’s Memorial
to Lidice - a moving rendition which goes more slowly and
tragically than many, although Eschenbach’s reading on
Ondine is the most anguished I’ve heard - and a novelty,
the Stalingrad Cantata of Václav Dobiás.
Written in 1945, the cantata for baritone, male chorus, and
orchestra is an eleven-minute paean to the Soviet forces, or
at least I’m assuming so, because the sung texts are not
provided. The music sounds a bit like a ramshackle Nevsky
Cantata, with the same wildness and raw masculine energy
but without the tunes or distinction. It counts as a welcome
rarity, though, because recordings of Dobiás are otherwise
basically non-existent.

These are valuable historical broadcasts all around, then, from
the world premiere recordings of Shostakovich’s Ninth
and probably a few other works too, to the Dvorak concerto from
the first Prague Spring festival. Rafael Kubelík’s
conducting is consistently superb and insightful; his Martinů
is energetic but powerful, his Shostakovich like nobody else.
This can all be had in more modern recordings - the Dvořák
symphony from Mackerras or Kubelík himself, the Martinů
from Belohlávek or Thomson - but as a two-disc monument
to Kubelík’s superb work with the Czech Philharmonic,
this can’t be beaten. For a one-CD tribute to that pairing
of great artists, though, we must remember the unforgettable
Smetana concert they gave after the end of the Cold War.

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